SHORT RIGA

As an individual department within this year’s festival the team behind the wittily titled SHORT RIGA have devised a remarkable feat – altogether three competitions of new shorts from around the world, Baltic student films and a separate category for music videos. Showcased within three respective programmes SHORT RIGA will take over the newly established small theater KINO BIZE as well as organise workshops and host an award ceremony.

Saul, a prisoner at Auschwitz who is forced to work at the camp’s crematorium assigns a special meaning to the last days of his life by deciding to bury a corpse of a little boy in accordance with Jewish traditions.

During a relatively short period of four years since 2011, the Atom Art studio’s series of short animations entitled “Shammies” has become something of a local sensation, as well as received much praise from across the border. The adorable animated characters explore the world just like their “peers” – the smallest movie-goers – would. This year comes with their newest adventures – the festival will premiere four new Shammies films. In these, Shammies will learn how take care of friends, build a house, do the chores, and play.

Ten-year-old Marie believes her parents’ jobs are more important to them than the relationship with her. Luckily, she has a wonderful granddad, a professor with a similar taste for adventure as has she. Marie and her friends are enjoying the summer holidays until the town is exposed to an unknown disease that makes all adults behave like children.

Athens, in the heat of summer. A bunch of schoolkids are hanging out in the yard. The classrooms are empty. The sun is scorching hot. A water bomb falls out of the sky, stirring up a water fight. It’s game on. But in this game, you play till you drop.

The film tells the love story of the refugee Patrick and Sara from Berlin, who are fighting together for refugee rights in Berlin. When harmless advance turns into a sexual assault, the group is forced to rethink their aims and the private love story grows to an unwanted public dimension.

A sensitive and introvert teenager lives under the shadow of his mother in Israeli periphery. The film explores questions of marginality and poverty in a Jewish-Arab society searching for its identity.

Luka moves to a small coastal town to live with his aunt, while his parents are in the middle of divorce. Besides the numbness, there is also Jana – a girl from the neighborhood who likes to take care of her tan. It’s a lazy end of the summer. Kids are jumping from the edge of the abandoned submarine port enjoying last days of vacation. When you are a kid, you never know that childhood ends.

Synthetic, animated figures coexist with elements of realistic images, diverse landscapes meet each other, music tracks of different origins and moods overlap and collide with real sounds of human environment. Sound layer of the film is on par with the visual and literary ones, fully reflecting the basic assumption of the film’s aesthetic: to build an utterance by overlapping contradictory tones, emotions and messages.

On the 3rd October 2013, a boat carrying 500 Eritrean refugees sunk off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa. More than 360 people drowned. Abraham, one of the survivors, walks through a graveyard of shipwrecks and vividly remembers the nightmarish experience. Meanwhile, chaos breaks loose at the harbour, whilst hundreds of coffins are being loaded onto a military ship.

We start with a close-up, and then, gradually, we start seeing the bigger, the more complex picture. And boy, is this picture indeed complex. Numerous tiny threads start enveloping the musicians, while the music develops more and more threads as well. At some point, you even realize you cannot believe your own eyes, but it’s a good thing – it means every smallest detail is constantly changing.

A love song video inspired by the classical story of Romeo and Juliet, turned into a personal interpretation. Experimental/non-photo real 3D animation provides a fun clash between classical ‘high art’ text and cartoony, lego like ‘low art’ animation. The strategy typical to pop art, used to provide us with a dreamy and trippy interpretation of a well-known love story.